Entertainment

Zoolit Launches Social Network Profile Link Aggregator

Zoolit launches their beta site today, offering users a simplistic approach to giving the world access to all of our social networking profiles. Zoolit shares very little information about yourself, other than the basics: name, location, contact info (from AIM to Skype) and a brief greeting. The real sharing takes place with the bookmarks you add, providing direct access to your MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn, Flickr accounts, and all the rest.

Zoolit is a convenient start page for personal management of your social networking profiles, and possibly a good resource for friends to keep up with your multiple identities on the web. They also provides a Zoolit button for you to place on all those social networking profile pages, so you can share your start page with others. The Zoolit button design is as simplistic as the rest of the site; perhaps too simplistic. Visitors of your profile wall won't know what the Zoolit button means, and probably won't click on it unless you tell them to. A short description of what the Zoolit button is for would make a world of difference for the overall use of the plug-in.

Overall, I don't know how well Zoolit will take off. Many sites like Profile Linker aim to provide an inclusive, over-arching gateway to the several profiles we have spread across the span of the web. As most social networking sites don't allow the skimming of profiles, it's difficult to provide much value in this arena. The most logical step for the social networks would be to provide an updating widget for frontpages like Pageflakes and Netvibes. Zoolit has taken a slightly different approach than many other network aggregators, but as you can't feed in data from any of the networks such as friends updates or message alerts, I'm hesitant to say Zoolit will reach critical mass.

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